REAL ROCKET MAN

On Tuesday Elon Musk's SpaceX launched the most powerful rocket on the planet, Falcon Heavy, from Cape Canaveral. A feat never before achieved by the private sector, it marks a turning point in the history of human space travel.

Though finances are fungible, thanks to Elon Musk the above is now a moot question: with this week's launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, for the first time in human history the private sector has designed and built the world's most powerful rocket.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk only gave Tuesday's liftoff a 50% chance of success.

Leaving earth three hours late in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Falcon Heavy carried with it a special memento for life on other planets: Elon Musk's very own cherry-red electric Tesla Roadster, fully equipped with a dummy astronaut in the driver's seat and “Don't panic!" written across the dashboard.

On its own course in the general direction of Mars, the Roadster's radio is set to David Bowie's “Life on Mars" on loop: if it doesn't crash into its designated planet, it is slated to drift 400 million kilometers from Earth over the course of a billion years.

Its launch is pivotal in more ways than one. Firstly, as a triumph for SpaceX: the last time the groundbreaking and monumentally ambitious firm tried to launch in September 2016, a fireball destroyed its Falcon 9 during a routine refueling procedure just two days before launch.

Second, as a coup for commercial spaceflight companies. When United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Lockheed, Boeing, and the US government, finally got its Delta IV Heavy off the ground in 2004, the world's third-highest capacity rocket cost the taxpayer USD435 million.

Beginning with France's Arianespace in 1980, a venture now mostly joint-owned by Airbus and Safran, the private sector race to space has been a long time coming.

Bolstered by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, established in 2000 with the goal of putting humans in outer space by 2018, and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic (est. 2004), SpaceX is now competing with Arianespace for the low-earth orbit market for launching satellites.

As Musk basks in the glory of Falcon Heavy, Arianespace is reporting record orders for 2018—some 14 launches scheduled for this year alone. This comes on top of 11 orders worth USD1.31 billion in 2017.

Though none of these firms have been able to convincingly demonstrate even the short or medium-term profitability of space exploration, private sector investors in the space industry do not seem to mind. In 2016 alone, space-related startups received USD2.8 billion in investment—just over half the entire budget of the National Cancer Institute, the US' leading research center on the disease that killed 600,000 Americans that same year.

While this is dwarfed by the USD19.5 billion in government support allocated to NASA in 2016, 0.5% of the federal government's budget, it's still USD400 million more than space-related start-ups got the year before. 35 years after Reagan's 'space wars' against Yuri Andropov and the Soviet Union, the future race to the heavens is as likely to be fought between the global public and private sectors as it is between rival state powers.

But on which grounds? If prestige and ideology fueled the US and Soviet race to outer space, what will drive its 21st century equivalent?